Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was a man of many talents including: scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, painter and sculptor. Da Vinci is revered for his technological ingenuity. He conceptualized a helicopter, a tank, concentrated solar power, a calculator, the double hull and outlined a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics. However, relatively few of his designs were constructed or were even feasible during his lifetime, but some of his smaller inventions, such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire, entered the world of manufacturing unheralded. As a scientist, he greatly advanced the state of knowledge in the fields of anatomy, civil engineering, optics, and hydrodynamics.
A codex of da Vinci's works was collated by Pompeo Leoni, in the late 16th century, called the Codex Atlanticus. It is a twelve-volume, bound set of 1,119 pages of drawings and writings dating from about 1478 to 1519. The contents of the codex cover a variety of subjects, including flight, weaponry, musical instruments, mathematics and botany.
Within the Codex Atlanticus, at folio 579r, there are plans for a “mechanical knight” as determined by Carlo Pedretti in 1957. Like many of da Vinci's designs, building the knight has proven a difficult and controversial exercise. The first attempt to construct it was in 2002 by Mark Rosheim for a television documentary. Since then, many exhibitions and museums of da Vinci's models have included a knight labelled, “Leonardo's robot”. However, those models do not correspond to the drawings found in folio 579r. Various workers in the field have indicated that, in addition to 579r, folios 1077r, 1021r and 1021v contain additional information for the construction of a functional knight/robot.
The present invention seeks to provide a workable solution to the mechanism of da Vinci's robot in particular, one based on a number of sketches from folio 579r.